Disruptors: Visionary founders and operators who are building scalable products, challenging the status quo, and driving innovation across industries.
Freddy Lydford Founder & CEO, Truecoco
Freddy Lydford is proving that a company can simultaneously feed global supply chains and heal the planet. TrueCoco which started as a commodities aggregator and exporter has successfully layered a high-tech industrial engine on top of this traditional foundation to monetize agricultural waste. In 2025, the company installed Ghana’s first industrial-scale biochar kiln to process. The facility successfully issued its first verified carbon credits which were purchased by Swiss climate-tech leader Climeworks.
Lydford is now aggressively scaling this circular model. He is developing a new site in Takoradi, scheduled for production in March 2026. By partnering with major sawmills to source over 20,000 MTs of certified sawdust, this second facility is projected to sequester more than 16,000 MTs of carbon dioxide annually.
Isidore Kpotufe, Founder & CEO, RiviaCo
Isidore Kpotufe is tackling Ghana’s primary healthcare crisis with a rare hybrid approach: combining scalable software with physical infrastructure upgrades. With 70% of Ghana relying on dilapidated clinics, Rivia’s “bricks-and-clicks” model upgrades infrastructure to meet the standardized “Rivia Standard.” This approach exploded in 2025, scaling from 8 to 52 facilities and serving 52,000 patients.
His impact was further validated this year by major corporate uptake; the Trasacco Group onboarded the staff of Ibis Styles Hotel onto the platform, and the Food and Drugs Authority shortlisted Rivia to manage health access for over 1,000 employees.
Kwadwo Owusu-Agyeman, Africa CEO, Akuna Wallet
Kwadwo Owusu-Agyeman is solving the critical “last mile” problem for the African creative economy: monetization. After successfully leading Paystack’s expansion in Ghana, Owusu-Agyeman recognized that while B2B payments were maturing, individual creators remained locked out of global monetization due to platform geoblocking and exorbitant fees. As the Africa Lead of Akuna Wallet—part of Idris Elba’s Akuna Group—he is dismantling the financial barriers that isolate African talent from global markets. Leveraging the Stellar blockchain, the platform provides creators with virtual global bank accounts, effectively bypassing the geoblocking and exorbitant fees that stifle growth.
His 2025 strategy secured high-level institutional validation, including a landmark MOU with the Bank of Ghana and a pilot partnership with the Ministry of Communication. Targeting an $18 billion market, Owusu-Agyeman is building more than a payment rail; he describes it as the industry’s “digital scaffolding,” integrating rights management with finance.
Kwame Bekoe, Co-founder & CEO, AfriSAF
Kwame Bekoe earns his place on this year’s impact list by addressing the single greatest bottleneck in the global energy transition: feedstock fragmentation. Leveraging two decades at giants like Airbus and GE Capital, Bekoe cofounded AfriSAF to industrialize Africa’s sustainable aviation fuel potential. Crucially, he is securing the biomass supply chain today through a sophisticated waste-to-value ecosystem. His digital marketplace acts as an “eBay for waste,” incentivizing farmers to sell agricultural residues for immediate monetization as bio-briquettes, while securing the future jet fuel pipeline.
This practical execution is backed by robust infrastructure, including a solar-integrated pilot facility and a new 400-acre expansion site in Asankare. This operational success received massive validation on December 2, 2025, through a landmark partnership with the African Airlines Association to fast-track the decarbonization of Africa’s aviation sector.
Valerie Labi, Co-founder & CEO, Wahu Mobility
Valerie Labi secures her place on this impact list by proving that African e-mobility can be both locally manufactured and globally financed. As the Co-founder and CEO of Wahu Mobility, the company launched Ghana’s first locally produced electric bikes, selling 1,920 units in 2024 specifically for the gig economy. In 2025, the company evolved from a manufacturer into a comprehensive net-zero ecosystem. This pivot was anchored by a historic agreement with Switzerland—the first of its kind under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement in Africa—which leverages carbon finance to fund the deployment of 117,000 e-bikes over five years.
Wahu Mobility further solidified this infrastructure with the Hero App, Africa’s first all-in-one digital platform for EV fleet management. Its vision now extends to deep-tech sovereignty; through a partnership with the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, the startup is training engineers to localize battery pack production. Simultaneously, it signed an OEM agreement with OX Delivers to shift electric truck production from the UK to Ghana.
Marie-Reine Seshie, Founder & CEO, Kola Market
Kola Market is re-engineering the access to capital challenge faced by African SMEs. Drawing from her experience in ecommerce and financial services, she identified that the primary reason banks reject small businesses is not only a lack of credit history, but the volatility of their cash flow caused by poor inventory management.
Her solution is a “sales-first” digital platform that leverages AI and local insights to supply merchants with fast-moving, high-demand products that generate predictable sales and margins sufficient to service loans. To protect lenders, Kola Market operates an inventory redistribution model: unsold goods are recovered and redeployed across its merchant network, preventing capital from being locked in dead stock.
By guaranteeing the inventory turnover, Kola Market is unlocking financing for over 4,500 merchants—80% of whom are women—who were previously considered unbankable. This “sales-first” model received validation in 2025, when the company sealed partnerships with major banks using its inventory guarantee to deploy capital. The company was also selected among the first grantees of the GSMA Innovation Fund for Impactful AI.
Miishe Addy – Co-founder & CEO, Jetstream Africa
Miishe Addy is redefining the mechanics of African trade by solving the liquidity bottleneck for exporters. As the Co-founder and CEO of Jetstream Africa, she has successfully pivoted the company from a traditional digital freight forwarder into a high-growth logistics-fintech hybrid. By using real-time shipping data to underwrite trade finance for SMEs, she successfully turned cargo into a bankable asset, a model validated by a remarkable 0% default rate in 2024.
In 2025, Jetstream reached company-wide profitability and signed partnerships with three major banks that had previously viewed the sector as too risky. Additionally, the company secured a landmark partnership in Nigeria that will expand their operations across the entire country. By surviving a near-death experience in mid-2024 to become profitable and bank-backed in 2025, the company is proving that the most critical infrastructure for Africa’s economic future isn’t just paved roads, but accessible capital.
Caleb Lomo, Chief Growth Officer, GreenHeart SE
Caleb Lomo earns his place on this impact list by reshaping how industrial carbon removal is deployed in Africa. As Chief Growth Officer of GreenHeart SE, he has led a decentralized, last-mile strategy that takes carbon capture infrastructure directly to where industrial waste is generated. At the centre of this model is GreenHeart’s proprietary pyrolysis units, which process five tonnes of biomass daily. Rather than relying on a central facility, Lomo has embedded these units within industrial clusters, reducing logistics costs and enabling immediate waste conversion.
In 2025, the company partnered with the Ada Magazine Palm Kernel Processors Association in the Eastern Region, palm kernel waste processed at source. This complements existing operations in Tepa, where GreenHeart converts woodmill residues across the Ashanti Region. The startup secured $50,000 investment from GBHub Africa to eliminate 1 million tonnes of CO2 over the next five years.
Kayode Adeyinka – Co-Founder & CEO, Gigmile
Gigmile, the Accra-and Lagos-based mobility fintech startup is de-risking the African gig economy, turning informal mobility into a profitable, investable asset class. The company is building a “lease-to-own” ecosystem focused entirely on asset utilization. This operational rigor drove the company to profitability in 2025, managing a fleet of over 8,500 vehicles valued at $18 million while maintaining a remarkable 94% repayment rate. By prioritizing the productivity of the asset rather than the credit score of the driver, Gigmile has unlocked financial access for over 15,000 workers previously invisible to the banking sector.
Meghan McCormick, Co-founder & CEO, Oze
Oze is bridging the SME financing gap by fundamentally changing how banks assess risk. Instead of demanding physical collateral, the startup uses data as currency. It begins as a digital bookkeeper, helping small business owners record daily transactions to build a verifiable financial history. Oze’s proprietary machine learning engine then analyzes this data to generate reliable credit scores, allowing financial institutions to issue unsecured loans to previously “unbankable” merchants.
This data-first approach paid off significantly in 2025, delivering a reported 36x impact return on every dollar invested. By processing nearly $1 million in loans, Oze helped drive interest rates down from a predatory 21% per month to just 3%. This shift contributed to an estimated €102 million in interest savings and generated €489 million in overall economic value. Crucially, the platform became a vital tool for women entrepreneurs, helping them avoid $7.5 million in losses and unlock $23.2 million in new business opportunities through better financial management.
Yaw Bediako, Co-founder & CEO of Yemaachi Biotech
In 2025, Yemaachi Biotech solidified its role as a catalyst for equitable, data-driven healthcare across Africa by expanding genomic capacity, building continent-wide research infrastructure, and forging strategic scientific partnerships. The company brought Illumina’s NovaSeq X Plus genome sequencer to Ghana, significantly boosting in-country capacity to decode cancer genomes and enabling faster, locally driven cancer research that directly serves African patients.
Yemaachi’s partnerships in 2025 reflect a deliberate push to turn African genomic insight into real world medical outcomes. Through the African Cancer Atlas, launched in partnership with Roche, the company is building one of the largest cancer genomic datasets from African populations, with plans to generate up to 15,000 paired tumour and normal genomes to improve biomarker discovery, drug targeting, and the accuracy of cancer treatments.
Complementing this upstream data work is Yemaachi’s partnership with Bio Usawa, which focuses on translating genomic insights into therapeutics by advancing monoclonal antibodies and biologic drug development tailored to African genetic diversity.
About the Author
Staff Reporter
Staff writer at Ghana Innovation Journal covering innovation, technology and entrepreneurship across Ghana and Africa.